finding most common letter in a bunch of words

say I have a bunch of words

x={'abac';'abaca';'abacate';'abacay';'abacinate';'abacination';'abaciscus'}

What would I write to find the most common letter in x so for example Most_common_letter=%most common letter that appears in x

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

It is easy using mode:

>> x={'abac';'abaca';'abacate';'abacay';'abacinate';'abacination';'abaciscus'};
>> char(mode(+[x{:}]))
ans = a

[Max]

thank you so much

Answer 2

[Guillaume]

Two steps are required:

1. build the histogram of the letters, however you want (using accumarray, histc or histcounts)
2. find the max of the histogram

x = {'abac';'abaca';'abacate';'abacay';'abacinate';'abacination';'abaciscus'};
[letter, ~, pos] = unique([x{:}]);
letterhist = accumarray(pos, 1); %letter histogram
[~, maxidx] = max(letterhist);
fprintf('the most frequent letter is: %c\n', letter(maxidx));

[Max]

I dont want to print the value, is it possible to just have most_common_letter='a' as an answer?

[Guillaume]

The printing was just for demo. Getting the letter is there right in the code:

letter(maxidx)

Answer 3

[Thorsten]

x={'abac';'abaca';'abacate';'abacay';'abacinate';'abacination';'abaciscus'};
[h c] = hist(double([x{:}]), double('a':'z'))
[~, idx] = max(h);
char(c(idx))